This is my least favourite of the revival 21st century BBC 'Ghost Story for Christmas' TV specials with very few admirable qualities but a range of unsatisfactory elements.
Characters are boorishly two dimensional and played with an according simplicity by the small cast. The production fails to generate a sense of authenticity which leaves it unable to function as a ghost story of a personal experience of the intrusion into the world of a malignant "other" force.
It is written in a way that suggests that initial on paper cleverness did not translate to the finished screenplay with ideas that should have been jettisoned after writing them up to a complete script being retained into production.
The mangling of a Sherlock Holmes cameo where Holmes fails dreadfully, indeed completely, at aiding a friend in need, unable to meet this request in any way leaves an odd smell behind. This is due to writing that should have not gone past a first draft.
This series seems to be running out of steam and this installment was so close to unwatchable that I couldn't imagine ever making a repeat viewing whereas some of its stablemates could sustain a second watch.
There are signs to me that the BBC can only make drama by rote, or by checklist, and that it is now a defacto Sunday School whereby the plebs can receive positive reinforcement from their social betters in the form of social morality parables delivered as inane TV programming. There is little other explanation for the writing and production decisions made in this adaptation that I can fathom, or speculatively guess at.
Certainly there is no sign of a ghost story motif in this: no sufficient effort is made to establish the normal, or natural, tempo for the world on view, as such inauthentic invasions don't seem weird and unsettling, we are just told that they are by explicit character exclamatory expositional dialogue. Without this sense of creeping weirdness into a hitherto normalcy there is no sense of growing fear, threat, menace for the suffering characters to endure in their mental experiences until the monster is finally made manifest to them and causes their ultimate dred and possibly expiry.
There is however sign aplenty that this has been put together to satisfy production criterias instigated in order to create a morally satisfactory cumulative effect on the audience: cognitive reinforcement of good and bad values. Sunday Schooling by TV drama.
As such it is both dim and dreary.
I rate at 2.5/10 because there were a handful of moments when the actors did enough with the dreck they were playing to hold my interest and suspend my disbelief enough to anticipate what will happen next in a scene. This seemed to me to be an occasional virtue of the actors rather than the writing or direction.
